The 5 Best Italian Restaurants in NYC

Sicilians, Calabrians, Florentines, and folks from all over Italy settled what is now New York City, bringing with them their bread, their cheese, their pasta, and the rest of their glorious culinary traditions. Today, we still feel the influence of NYC’s deep Italian roots. On one corner you can find a tub of freshly made ricotta, on the next a perfect plate of eggplant parm, and down the street a restaurant serving plates of cacio e pepe just like you’d get in Rome.

There’s such an abundance of Italian food in this city, it can be difficult to wade through the mediocre to find the truly amazing spots. Which is why we’ve listed our top Italian restaurants in NYC, including both classics and newcomers. We’ve featured a throwback Williamsburg joint servingcheese-and-sauce–laden Italian American stalwarts, alongside Brooklyn’s best farm-to-table pizza spot and a West Village hideaway serving lusty plates of foie gras pasta and perfect Negronis.

Here are our picks for the best places to eat fantastic Italian fare in NYC.

Bamonte's

Address and phone: 32 Withers St, Williamsburg, Brooklyn (718-384-8831)
Website:yelp.com/biz/bamontes-brooklynGood for: Old-school red sauce
If you spent all your your time hopping from one newly minted hot spot to the next, you'll miss out on Bamonte's, the type of throwback joint that reminds you why this city is so special in the first place. A few things to know: The place has been opened since 1900, the tablecloths are white, and many of the regulars look like they just stepped out of Central Casting. It's hard to image that you're a stone's throw from the epicenter of hipster Williamsburg when an old waiter with a heavy accent is serving you mussels drenched in marinara sauce, baked ziti, homemade lasagna, and all the other cheese-and-sauce–laden stalwarts of the Italian-American canon. True, the food's not as good as the stuff at Carbone, the much hyped facsimile of an old West Village red-sauce joint run by the Rich Torrisi and Mario Carbone. But that's like comparing the Clooney-and-Pitt Ocean's 11 to the Rat Pack original—Bamonte's is the O.G., and the magic of a night there can't be faked.
Order this: Baked ziti, mussels marinara, baked clams, veal rollatini, tiramisu

Perla

Address and phone: 24 Minetta Ln (212-933-1824)
Website:perlanyc.comGood for: Date night, celebratory meals
With its classic cocktails, hip-hop on the speakers, and lusty Italian fare, Perla sounds like a restaurant straight out of the post-millenial NYC playbook—on paper, it's almost annoyingly on-trend. Yet once you go there, you kind of never want to go anywhere else when you're in the mood for one of those spendy New York nights that involves drinking Negronis, ordering the pasta that has foie gras in it, and maybe listening to Get Rich or Die Trying all the way through. The intimate scene is a credit to the genius of restaurateur Gabe Stulman, the same dude behind a bunch of nearby places that are just as hard to get into, including Chez Sardine and Fedora. But it's former Mario Batali lieutenant Michael Toscano whose pastas and meats—including rich agnolotti with beef cheek, and one of the best lamb dishes in the city—make the place worthy of returning to time and again.
Order this: Veal tongue with sweetbreads; burrata with salmon roe and leeks; parpardelle with duck ragu and foie gras; agnolotti with beef cheek and brown beech mushroom butter; leg of lamb with shishito peppers, calabrian chile, and yogurt

Il Buco Alimentari & Vineria

Address and phone: 53 Great Jones St (212-837-2622)
Website:ilbucovineria.comGood for: Getting your Italian fix at any time of day
New York's blockbuster HQ of Italian cooking is Eataly, the Mario Batali and Joe Bastianich-backed mega-market with six restaurants packed inside of it. But if tourist throngs aren't your scene, detour to Il Buco Alimentari & Vineria, which is sort of Eataly in minature—there's a bakery and café up front with excellent bread and sandwiches, a bar flanked by shelves of imported Italian food products, and in the back, a rustic dining room ideal for communal feasts. Chef Justin Smillie coaxes the best out of the simplest, most high-quality ingredients, turning seemingly mundane classics like cacio e pepe into something you'll be talking about for days. But while you should definitely have some pastas on your table, the one essential order is a the dinosaur-size short rib cooked in a wood-burning oven—all you need is a fork (or your hands) to pull it right off the bone.
Order this: Crostoni di baccala, bucatini cacio e pepe, salt-baked whole branzino, slow-roasted short ribs

Franny's

Address and phone: 348 Flatbush Ave, Park Slope, Brooklyn (718-230-0221)
Website:frannysbrooklyn.comGood for: A Brooklyn neighborhood fixture with extraordinary pizza
Franny's has been a staple and neighborhood fixture in Park Slope for 10 years now. Pizza is a prerequisite of any visit—the 900-degree wood-fired oven produces pies with a bubbly, charred crusts in just 90 seconds. These are perfect Neapolitan pies, featuring toppings like littleneck clams and chillies, n'duja sausage and potato, and classic buffalo mozzarella and tomato. Franny's mantra is farm-to-table, which explains extraordinary dishes like fall vegetables with bagna cauda, and breadcrumbs and stracci pasta with kale pesto and chestnuts. If Franny's is packed (as it usually is), try your luck at its new restaurant, Marco's, which is an Italian trattoria just a skip and a jump down the street.
Order this: Pizza with clams, chillies, and parsley; pizza with cauliflower, anchovies, capers, chilies, and pecorino romano; pork cheek and beef tongue terrine; trenette with rabbit ragu and capers

Osteria Morini

Address and phone: 218 Lafayette St (212-965-8777)
Website:osteriamorini.comGood for: Rustic Emilia-Romagna dishes in a hip Soho setting
Michael White's rustic, Emilia Romagna-inspired Osteria Morini is mainly about pasta. Specifically, it's about pillowy little ravioli hats called cappelletti that are filled with whipped ricotta, then accented with truffle oil, butter, and salty bits of prosciutto. But if you just ordered pasta you would be missing out on the mare salad, a towering pile of scallops, shrimp, and squid tossed with olives, capers, and a good bit of lemon juice. You'd also be missing out on the thick, crackly slab of porchetta, or spit-roasted Hampshire pork cooked with rosemary and sage. Don't leave without dessert, because the affogato—espresso and amaro poured over homemade vanilla gelato—is like the grown-up Italian variation of a sundae (and it's awesome).
Order this: Cappelletti pasta (ricotta-filled ravioli), insalata di mare (seafood salad), fegatini (duck liver mousse), porchetta, sformato (parmesan and truffle custard with mushrooms), affogato

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